Celebration in Honor of Mary Lou Williams' Undead Melodies
Digging into the world of jazz can get a tad frustrating when you realize your knowledge's just a drop in the ocean. I've considered myself no stranger to the realm, casually sprinkling in conversations tidbits about Sun Ra's past or the fact that Mary Lou Williams wasn't a product of an alien planet but a rhythm & blues pianist. Yet, I couldn't ID her when her name popped up, or for that matter, decipher what "zombie music" meant.
Enter "Reading Jazz," a literary treasure trove compiled by New Yorker editor-in-chief Robert Gottlieb in 1995, housing excerpts from musician memoirs, concert reports, essays, and critiques. It finger-paints a vivid picture of everything that occurred in jazz since the early days of black & white and ragtime & free jazz. Mary Lou Williams, whom Gottlieb credits as "by far the most important and influential woman in jazz history," penned her longest autobiographical text in this gem, which reads like a Jack London adventure novel, filled with the gritty details that serve as the backbone of gangster jazz films like "Cotton Club."
Mary Lou, born in 1910, learned the ropes of piano playing from her mother who played the pump organ. She soon became the "little piano girl" in Pittsburgh, performing at parties, which served both the upper crust and the working-class African American community. Her father, a professional gambler, regularly took her to smoky clubs where she honed her skills for extra cash. Inspired by an unnamed pianist who sat at the keys with her legs crossed, a cigarette in her mouth, Mary Lou started her journey, eventually recording her lively ragtime "Nightlife" in 1927 and embarking on a two-month tour with a "black vaudeville show" at the tender age of 14.
Despite her bleak cards, Mary Lou's talent as a pianist, arranger, and composer soon got her noticed. She landed commissions from Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, while Nazi Germany was banning "anglo-jewish pestilence."
Her life story was nothing short of astounding, even to jazz fans like me who primarily crave the sounds of 1945 and beyond. Eventually, her friend Thelonius Monk entered the picture, introducing the term "zombie music," which immediately piqued my interest. Monk explained that in the mid-30s, Mary Lou and him, still teenagers, experimented with "weird harmonies" that would become his signature sound. However, instead of zombie, they called it 'zombie music,' as those bizarre chords reminded them of the eerie music from horror films like "Frankenstein."
Mary Lou, always innovative and eager to experiment, embodied this free-thinking spirit and kept the Blues-Gospel-Ragtime tradition alive while observing and being influenced by every innovation in the jazz scene. In the early 40s, she voiced her concerns about the "zombie aspects" of jazz in New York, lamenting the fact that innovative ideas were swiftly stolen and exploited. It wasn't until Monk asserted that they were doing something new and different that couldn't be stolen because they couldn't play it, that the tides began to change. The music "reactionaries" labeled the revolutionary bebop sound as "violent" and "the worst things" due to the rejection of conventional harmony and melody.
Ironically, despite being at the epicenter of the bebop revolution, Mary Lou never claimed to be a pioneer. Instead, she served as a "Mother of Bebop," gathering with disc jockeys and newspapermen at her apartment in the wee hours of the morning after all the jobs were done. They exchanged ideas and "really made some noise," eventually earning her the title.
Zombie music continued to inspire Mary Lou throughout her career, whether she was recording for Folkways or her own Mary Records, teaching, going through tough times, becoming a Catholic, writing orchestral works, collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie, receiving a doctorate, or even in her last album in 1978. She was unpredictable, always rooted in her blues, and against stagnation.
Sadly, Mary Lou's contributions to jazz encyclopedias are marginal, and even in extensive ones dedicated to African Americans, she gets only a few lines. Yet, she remains alive in the United States with numerous biographies, a "Mary Lou Williams Woman in Jazz Festival," and recent jazz recordings, like Geri Allen's with Oliver Lake and Andrew Cyrille. Most significantly, Moor Mother dedicated a hymn to her historic journey on her album "Jazz Codes."
In her unfinished memoirs from 1954, the mother of zombie music wrote: "I will never admire a robot pianist whose runs come only from his studies and not from his feelings." Mary Lou Williams, indeed, lived a life steeped in emotion, experimentation, and unwavering passion for music, forever challenging the status quo.
Reading "Zombie Music" in Mary Lou Williams' unfinished memoirs revealed more about the origins of her unique and innovative sound. It was during her teenage years with Thelonius Monk that they invented the term, describing their experimental use of 'weird harmonies' as 'zombie music', reminiscent of the eerie music from horror films like "Frankenstein". The term persisted throughout her career, symbolizing her constant pursuit of unconventional sounds, defying the norms of jazz.
